That’s according to an interview he and his brother Dave (who co-stars in “The Disaster Artist”) just did with the Independent, which comes with a disclaimer: Much of the footage they shot was left on the cutting-room floor.

James Franco is one of the six names in entertainment being celebrated at the inaugural IndieWire Honors on Nov. 2. Franco is recognized here for his transformative portrayal of the star and director of “The Room” in A24’s upcoming “The Disaster Artist” (In theaters nationwide December 8), which Franco also produced and directed. He will receive the IndieWire’s Vanguard Award (Film).

For a few years, James Franco was everywhere: Hosting the Oscars. Getting college degrees. Teaching college courses. Directing movies. Acting in movies. Writing about movies. Making art. Writing novels. Starting a band. Every now and then, he would penetrate the mainstream, with commercial releases like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “The Interview.” By and large, however, the affable face from “Freaks and Geeks,” Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” movies, and “127 Hrs” had grown so ubiquitous it had become difficult to discern the big picture.

Scott Haze goes all in when he prepares for a role. For his breakout, 2013’s James Franco-directed “Child of God,” in which he played a homeless man, he shed 45 pounds and slept in caves. For “Thank You for Your Service,” which opens Oct. 27, he confined himself to a wheelchair for weeks to portray real-life disabled veteran Michael Emory. In “Only the Brave,” debuting Oct. 20, Haze plays another fact-based character, Arizona firefighter Clayton Whitted, part of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. He also directed the documentary “Mully,” about Kenyan doctor Charles Mulli, who runs a child rescue organization in Africa. The doc is set to hit theaters Oct. 3.

How did you prepare for “Thank You for Your Service”?

I quit walking for a month and a half, to get inside the mind of Emory. I fly out to San Antonio to meet him and stay with him. We go to Fort Sam Houston, and he says,

Clay McLeod Chapman doesn't just write horror, he performs it in The Pumpkin Pie Show, an immersive storytelling experience that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing Chapman perform (which our own Daily Dead Editor-in-Chief Jonathan James experienced at The Overlook Film Festival), you can certainly read his work anytime in a number of books, including his new short story collection, Nothing Untoward: Stories from The Pumpkin Pie Show. To celebrate the release of his new collection, we caught up with Chapman for our latest Q&A feature to discuss his literary influences, twenty years of The Pumpkin Pie Show, writing The Tribe trilogy for Disney press, and his upcoming Marvel project that he describes as "a love story between Deadpool and Venom."

What authors and storytellers were you drawn to in your formative years that influenced your own writing and performing?

James Franco has done a lot of things, we’ve heard. Following a successful turn on Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and a well-received starring spot on a TNT biopic on James Dean, he turned immediately to a litany of pursuits: from playwriting and English degrees to painting and directing no less than ten feature-lengths. The latter project interested me. Were they any good? In Franco’s Rolling Stone profile last year, Jonah Weiner ran around a thesaurus of words like “dizzying,” “indefatigable“ and, wait for it, “multihyphenate” to describe his subject but none of those words mean very much. Paul Klee painted over a thousand paintings in the penultimate last year of his life. So could I. So what?

“What did we do to deserve James Franco?,” asked Rex Reed in a slightly different era. Back then, even the The Guardian agreed with Jared Kushner

Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions for us, Pamela. What attracted you to telling this story by Adam and Matt Rager?

Pamela Romanowsky: Well, the first question for me was “why a horror film?” I like films across lots of genres, but I’m not a horror buff, so this was a first for me. The horror films I do love are genre blending, movies that are character-based and explore things that are dark but still based in reality, and in the dark corners of human psychology. I’ve never really been scared of the supernatural, but people are certainly capable of terrifying and very dark things.

Let it be known that I genuinely like James Franco. Given the choice between ‘yer average pretty boy movie star and a ludicrous avant-garde polymath jester, I’ll pick the latter every time. Problem is, while the self-titled Mayor of Gay Town gleefully smashes through cultural/social/artistic boundaries like a steam train, the art that’s produced at the end of it is… not great.

James Franco’s death march through the American literary canon continues with In Dubious Battle, a John Steinbeck adaptation so conventionally dismal that it makes one better appreciate the artsy, dawdling garbage that is the actor turned dilettante’s usual stock in trade. Every Franco personal project—from his unintelligible, low-budget adaptations of William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound And The Fury) and Cormac McCarthy (Child Of God) to his novels and assorted experiments in self-fellatio—is born with a “Kick Me” sign on its back, begging critics to punt it in the keister for making artistic ambition look lame. This one even comes with a freebie: It’s got “dubious” right there in the title. But instead of being sloppily miscalculated (the “Franco touch”), this attempt at a Depression-era labor drama in the vein of John Sayles just bores its way through almost two hours of screen

Continuing his brave effort to ensure that future students of American literature can just buy the VOD equivalent of a box set instead of ever having to read another Great American Novel again, actor-director James Franco has moved from adapting Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury) and McCarthy (Child of God) to Steinbeck with In Dubious Battle. The author's novel is the first of what would become Steinbeck’s Dustbowl trilogy (which also includes Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath) and recounts a Great Depression-era strike that apple pickers in California organized to get

The Birth of a Nation isn’t out for a few more months, but writer/director/co-producer/star Nate Parker’s next project is already lined up. Legendary has acquired an idea for an original feature film from Parker, reports Deadline; though it’s currently untitled and no plot details are being released, the new film is said to revolve around “creating a world.” He will once again write, direct and produce.

Read More: ‘Birth of a Nation’: Controversial New Poster Shows Nate Parker In American Flag Noose

Parker set a Sundance record when his “Birth of a Nation” was acquired at the festival for $17.5 million by Fox Searchlight. In addition, his based-on-fact slavery drama won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition.

The feature has been garnering award season buzz after it took home the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at the Utah-held festival this year. Upon its premiere, it set a Sundance record when it was acquired by Fox Searchlight for $17.5 million.

Sundance Institute announced that Nate Parker is this year’s Vanguard Award recipient. The award will be presented to the director and actor at the Night Before Next celebration on August 11 at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in Los Angeles. The summer festivity will benefit the Institute and its artists on the eve of Sundance Next Fest.

“Night Before Next will bring our community together to celebrate and support independent artists who create bold, original work,” said Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute. “In this spirit, we are excited to honor Nate Parker as he prepares to release the extraordinary film ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ which we supported during development and premiered at our Festival.”

James + Semaj is a column where James Franco talks to his reverse self, Semaj, about new films. Rather than a conventional review, it is place where James and Semaj can muse about ideas that the films provoke. James loves going to the movies and talking about them. But a one-sided take on a movie, in print, might be misconstrued as a review. As someone in the industry it could be detrimental to James’s career if he were to review his peers, because unlike the book industry—where writers review other writer’s books—the film industry is highly collaborative, and a bad review of a peer could create problems. So, assume that James (and Semaj) love all these films. What they’re interested in talking about is all the ways the films inspire them, and make them think. James is me, and Semaj is the other side of me.

This week’s column is about “Swiss Army Man,” which opens theatrically on Friday.

Semaj: Yeah, but only because the character in “Child of God” sleeps with his corpses and then starts to murder more people to have more companions.

James: That character, Lester Ballard, was loosely based on the real murderer, Ed Gein, notorious bone and skin collector and exhumer of bodies. He made lampshades out of skin, and bedposts out of skulls.

James: Anyway, “Swiss Army Man” does deal with a corpse like all those films, but it does it in a different way. Somehow it’s not as bleak, and grisly. It’s pretty skillful how they pull it off.

Semaj: “Weekend at Bernie’s” already pulled off a corpse comedy.

James: This isn’t like “Weekend at Bernie’s” either. That’s a straight-up comedy, but like the Two Corey’s classic, “License to Drive,” the comedy comes from the characters trying to disguise the fact that they are carting around a corpse.

James: Exactly. Paul Dano’s character is so lonely that on the brink of suicide he meets the Daniel Radcliff corpse and immediately begins to develop a friendship with him.

Semaj: In a way, it’s as if Paul Dano’s character is animating the corpse with his own thoughts and feelings.

James: Exactly! He provides the corpse with his personality.

Semaj: Sort of like you do with these columns — you animate both sides of a conversation.

James: Yeah, I guess so. Maybe I’m lonely, too.

Semaj: I’m here for you.

James: Thanks, man.

Semaj: So, does that mean that Paul Dano’s character is having a bromance with himself?

James: Sort of, but it’s more complex than that. One of the things that is great about necrophilia stories, despite their disguising reality, is they allow an intense examination of what it means to be intimate with an other. Dano’s character wants what everyone wants: to connect to another, to love and be loved. But he has been damaged by a loveless father, and is so insecure that he is incapable of speaking to the woman he’s attracted to on his bus route.

Semaj: So he isolates himself in the wilderness, and becomes lonelier.

James: He has given up on conventional social interactions, he can’t do it, the world has rejected him. He feels ugly and unlovable.

Semaj: But when he finds the corpse he can infuse it with all his ideas of a perfect mate. He is out in the woods with no one to contradict him, so his imagination can run wild, and he can believe, without any objections from the greater world, that his new corpse friend can talk, and use his farts to propel them over the water like a jet ski, or light fires, or shoot them up into the sky to evade dangerous animals.

James: Exactly. So you think that all that fantastic stuff is in Paul Dano’s imagination?

Semaj: I think so, but it doesn’t really matter after a while because the movie takes us on his ride, we are experiencing everything through his eyes, so whether that stuff really happens or not doesn’t matter as much as having those experiences affect him, and seeing that they are emotionally real for him. Because of that, the audience also feels.

James: That’s one thing the movie does really well: it draws you into his quirky world so you can get on board with what would otherwise, in actuality, be a fucked up situation.

Semaj: I think the farts have a lot to do with making the whole thing more palatable.

James: You’re exactly right. It seems like a silly thing, and amongst people I’ve talked to, the movie is already known as the “farting corpse movie,” but the idea that the corpse’s gas aids Dano’s imagination when animating the corpse is crucial. From the first meeting on, the corpse farts, and it immediately takes the tone of the film out of the macabre and into the more enjoyable realms of a quirky bromance, where two oddball guys can enjoy fart jokes, talk about women, masturbation, and in the end forge an intimate bond.

James: The movie was directed by two guys with the first name Daniel, so they’re credited as “Daniels.”

Semaj: Maybe making the movie was a kind of bromance for them, too.

James: There is nothing more intimate than creating something with someone. That’s why I collaborate with all my friends again and again.

Semaj: Basically the corpse provides Dano with everything he was denied by everyone else in his life.

James: Exactly, just like all bromances do. In “Pineapple Express,” Dale realizes that his weird drug dealer Saul is actually his best friend; in “Superbad,” the boys learn that they love each other more than anyone; “This is the End” is partly an examination of the strain that trauma puts on friendships, and ultimately the triumph of true friendship, even when facing the end of the world.

Semaj: It’s weird that they didn’t let you go to heaven at the end of that film.

James: You’re telling me! I mean Wtf? I sacrificed myself for Seth, and I still don’t get to go to heaven?

James: Well, Hell would be heaven with a friend like Danny, and Heaven would be Hell without Seth.

Semaj: Awwww.

Related storiesDaniel Radcliffe and His 'Swiss Army Man' Dummy: What We Learned From This Dynamic Duo On A24's NYC Bus Tour'Swiss Army Man' Online Game: Play With Daniel Radcliffe's CorpseWatch: Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe Sing Their Way Through Wild 'Swiss Army Man' Soundtrack

The long-in-the-works adaptation is based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s and traces the journey of the Kid, a 14-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world when he joins a ruthless gang of scalphunters that includes the mysterious and menacing Judge Holden.

Update: THR is reporting the film has now being shelved because the filmmakers don’t actually have the rights to the novel — classic mistake. Check out the original story below.

I can say this much for James Franco‘s Blood Meridian adaptation: nobody wants it more than him. He first dipped into the nasty waters of Cormac McCarthy‘s seminal text — one that usually tops lists ranking the best post-World War II novels — by signing on more than five years ago. That didn’t seem to work out, at least initially, though he did get to work on another McCarthy adaptation, Child of God, about which we were rather positive; and that was followed by the release of test footage, 25 minutes in total, from which his perspective and approach should be gleaned a bit. If nothing else, this is exactly how a multi-hyphenate keeps chipping away at the adaptation of their favorite novel,

Update: THR reports that this entire project has fallen apart because the filmmakers didn't have the rights to the novel. How they could have possibly thought they could have made the movie without those rights is unclear. Original article follows.

A film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian has been kicking around Hollywood for what seems like decades at this point, and a somewhat unlikely man is bringing it to life: James Franco. Deadline reports that the prolific filmmaker — if you haven't been paying attention, you probably didn't know he's directed seven movies in the past three years and has a staggering eight more currently in post-production — will direct and star in the new movie, and Russell Crowe is in talks to co-star. X-Men: Apocalypse star Tye Sheridan and Daredevil baddie Vincent D'Onofrio are on board as well.

Exclusive: A major all-star package has dropped into the market on the eve of Cannes as it emerged on Thursday that Scott Rudin is finally moving ahead on his long-gestating Cormac McCarthy adaptation.

Im Global will launch international sales on the Croisette on Blood Meridian and is co-financing the project, while CAA represents Us rights.

IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.